If you’ve ever taught with a Wikipedia assignment or enrolled in one of our Wiki Scholars & Scientists professional development courses, you’re familiar with Wiki Education’s Dashboard and all of the ways it tracks your Wikimedia work, not to mention the thrill of watching the readership statistics of your contributions climb.

To date, more than 150,000 people have engaged with the Dashboard through our educational programming and nearly 4,000 instructors have used it for their courses. But the impact of this open source technology reaches beyond even our own programming – used by the broader Wikimedia community, our global Programs & Events Dashboard has supported more than 110,000 users and thousands of editing events worldwide. 

As an open source technology, the Dashboard is developed through public collaboration and its source code is freely available for anyone to use. But who exactly works to create and sustain the Dashboard, and how? Wiki Education’s Chief Technology Officer Sage Ross and a few of its many contributors took us under its hood during last month’s Speaker Series webinar, “Open Source Technology: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard.”

“A huge number of other people [beyond myself] have come along to make major contributions to this code base,” said Ross, recognizing the work of nearly 200 Dashboard contributors since its inception.

Panelist Matthew Fordham, a software developer based in Seattle, helped oversee the initial development of the Dashboard and has collaborated with Ross for many years.

“It’s amazing and so gratifying to hear how what we started so long ago has continued to evolve and grow, and become so much deeper and more sophisticated,” said Fordham. “With open source and with this project, there’s a lot of potential.” 

Ross and Fordham were joined by university students Sulagna Saha and Om Chauhan, who discussed their experiences working to improve the Dashboard.

Saha, a senior at Mount Holyoke College studying computer science, came to the project in summer 2023 through Outreachy, a program that provides internships in open source and open science. 

In the year since her internship, Ross said he “[hadn’t] had to touch [Saha’s] code at all,” something that’s rare in a field where maintainers frequently have to tweak older code so it can work with changes elsewhere in the code base. “It makes me really proud as a mentor. You made a product worth its weight in gold.”

When asked to reflect on her experience working on the open source project, Saha explained how she transitioned from feeling nervous to feeling welcome.

“Open source is kind of like entering a room where it feels like everyone knows everything, because it’s collaborative,” explained Saha. “But because it is collaborative, it is the best space to feel safe and ask anything.”

Chauhan, a junior at Bennett University, brought his experience as a computer science major to the Dashboard this past summer through Google’s Summer of Code program. Like Saha, Chauhan underscored the community-driven nature of working on open source technology, as well as the importance of exploring the documentation and existing contributions when entering an open source project.

“For someone who is new to the project, be patient, integrate gradually, and engage with the community,” advised Chauhan.

Fordham, who works in both open source technology and the private sector, finds that contributing to open source projects can be particularly rewarding.

“The more open source contributors, the more opinions on what the goal is, so it’s a totally different thing [than the private sector], and in so many ways, more gratifying,” said Fordham. ”It doesn’t simplify things to have more cooks in the kitchen, but the reasons they are there are sometimes more heartfelt.”

Catch up on our Speaker Series on our YouTube channel, including “Open Source Tech: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard,” and join us for a very special edition of our Speaker Series on Tuesday, December 10: 

Celebrating 10 Years of Wiki Education

Tuesday, December 10 at 10 am Pacific / 1 pm Eastern

Learn more and register now

Introduction

I had the golden chance to attend the Bangla Wikiconference 2024 and what’s more is that I was on the volunteer team. I volunteered so that I could learn something. Now, when I started writing this, I understood that I have indeed learned many things that people can learn only through experience. The funny thing is I have never been to a conference before and I never knew how operations’s teams work. I was lucky to have some amazing seniors to guide me properly.

Pre-conference work

A one-hour meeting every Thursday night without any physical work was really boring. I was a part of the operations team, so at the first phase all I needed to do was keep myself updated about all the work that the scholarship and programs team does. I diligently followed our meeting schedule because I have to come up with something to not lag behind as a newbie. We got the updated news in a jiffy when the meeting started. And then we began to converse with each other with various stuff like how’s life treating you etc. Sometimes our meeting time exceeded; however, we kept gossiping. This happened at the early stage of our meeting. But later on, it helped me. When there was much important stuff to discuss and after an hour our meeting still went on, no one complained; they understood each other’s situation properly. 

While the scholarship team was making decisions, we were brainstorming as to where we should arrange our conference. I was not experienced with this stuff, so I browsed online and asked my uncle for suggestions so that I could participate in the conversation. Well, at last my suggestion was not chosen, but I have no regrets because the place we have chosen at last was awesome. The place was Dream Square Resort. We went there to see if everything was alright and if we could arrange our conference there. We made some questions regarding our conference and asked them one by one. We found the service very satisfactory at that time. After that, there were tasks like ordering and preparing all the materials needed for the conference, gift items, and sorting tech gadgets. They were not smooth sailing, but we pulled it off brilliantly (that’s what I think). At last came 14 November. The day was very hectic. We left early with all the logistics. We reached the resort after a 3.5+ hour journey. That day was spent familiarizing ourselves with all the people we interact with virtually. It was nice getting to know the people whom you know online. 

At the conference

The challenge started the next day. We had a scheduled time to start the registration and the session at 8.30. Unfortunately, we had some issues and we started a bit late. It was covered with utilizing the gap programs the team kept in case of emergency. People were very obsequious when the session had started. They listened quietly and it was a happy and friendly environment. 

The content of the sessions was very helpful. There was an engaging session of Rocky Masum where we all participated in a random quest to find out the problems,solutions and good points of some sister projects of Bangla Wikimedia. There was a session of Sujata Didi where she taught us how some Wikipedians translate some contents wrong, and it created awareness among us. The first speech of Foyzul Latif sir made me think from a different perspective. Panel discussions about wikibarta, the talk about the future of patrolling, about wikiloves butterfly, about the Wikinondini session of Dolon Prova, the integration of AI in wikipedia and how AI is using Wikipedia—all of these were insightful.

The checkmate session of Maruf and Shakil Vai and the session of Aishik Vai about lexeme were awesome. And the parallel session about how to spread the wikimedia movement to the student community by Delowar Akram Vai was mind-blowing. If not for the time shortage, there were potentials of positive discussion. The short project of yahya Vai, where he created a new script and showed it to us went straight over my head (I literally don’t know about scripts; what can I do?). The surprising thing is, even though I am not a coder guy, I really enjoyed the hackathon.

Special thanks to those who insisted on doing a hackathon. And the session of Anup Sadi Vai about the river was really concerning. Last but not least was the session of Shabab Mustafa; he really gave us some topics to brainstorm till the next conference. 

Night Activities

We played football, created new games like footbasketball where you have to do a 3-point shot from a certain direction with a football, badminton etc. And my roommate was suffering from a cold and fever, so I had to keep reporting about his condition from time to time. At 11 pm, we fixed our meeting about what happened and how to make our conference better than before. We self-criticized there and learned from the mistakes. There were a few issues; we tried to fix them by talking with the staff of the resort. And the gossiping after the meeting continued on. As I am not a night owl, I had to leave early(?) at 2 AM. But others continued till 4 AM! I still regret why I was not there with them; I might have missed some valuable experiences. 

Post-conference

On 17 November, we were all ready to depart, but everybody kept talking because they wanted to savor the last moment of gossiping to their heart’s content with people who shared the same interest. The bus was late to depart despite it coming early. We heard Bengali songs. Our Nepali friend Himel Da sang a Nepali song. Everyone enjoyed the moments in the bus. At last, everyone left. I had a job delivering luggage in our wikimedia office and helping Himel Da book a hotel for him to stay in. When I returned home, it was almost 6 p.m., and I was totally exhausted. 

The learning

This conference really brought all of us together. The bond is now stronger. And it is as if the community has turned over a new leaf. Everyone feels motivated to work. 

Through this conference, I learned resource management, event management, leadership, and gained confidence. I learned what it means to be a true wikimedian. The experiences I gained are immense. The late-night Adda, hearing experiences of senior Wikipedians, exchanging insights and ideas with fellow-minded people—all of these are precious memories that I won’t forget.

To learn more about the conference: https://w.wiki/AWnu

By Rupal Karia, Outreach and Community Coordinator for Wikimedia UK

We currently have 62 trainers in 33 different locations across the country, all involved in Wikimedia work in different ways. Volunteer trainers are at the heart of delivering Wikimedia UK programmes. They act as community leaders, extend our work to underrepresented communities and they train new and existing editors. Based on feedback we received from trainers, we decided to focus on upskilling existing WMUK trainers rather than recruiting and training a new cohort of trainers.

We conducted a survey with WMUK accredited trainers on topics that they would like to learn more about, or that would be useful for their work and the communities they work with. Based on these results we came up with a programme of training which people could join in-person or online, culminating in a hybrid event in Leeds in October 2024. We know meeting in-person allows for trainers to build relationships and make connections with others but not everyone has the flexibility and time to do so, therefore we opted for a mostly hybrid set up where people could join in-person or online to the sessions that were relevant to their work and training needs.

The training was fully funded by WMUK. 16 people attended some or all of the events over a two week period. Most of these sessions were recorded so that those who couldn’t attend had the opportunity to watch and learn in their own time. 

Below is a rundown of the programme of events.

Making an impact with minimal time commitments

This session came about due to feedback from trainers and the people they work with who don’t have the time to design and deliver events but want to do something worthwhile and impactful. Over the last few years, we have received feedback that volunteers are struggling to find time to design and run training sessions but still want to be involved within Wikimedia projects. This session was designed to give volunteers ideas on small tasks they can carry out when time allows. It ties in with a wider project we are exploring to have an ongoing microvolunteering task list for volunteers to access and use when they have a little bit of time as well as exploring other ways volunteers can be involved.

How to carry out research to improve the representation of underrepresented groups 

This session focussed on the process of creating a worklist for an event or campaign, ways to find gaps on Wikipedia, with tips & suggestions for research strategies and places to go to find sources.  

This session ties in with our Strategic Aim of Knowledge Equity. Many of the trainers focus on underrepresented groups and one of the challenges reported by them is knowing what is missing on Wikipedia and then compiling worklists based on this research.

Marketing your events with Dr Lucy Hinnie

Feedback we had from trainers was that although the Train the Trainer course equips them with skills to design and deliver Wiki training events they’d value additional training on how to market events.

Dr Lucy Hinnie discussed her experience of marketing events and wiki influencing people in the Connected Heritage Project, with a particular focus on marketing with low to no budget, and also exploring options other than edit-a-thons / wikithons. We explored pot luck edit-a-thons rather than theme focussed sessions. There was also a space for participants to share their own examples of what has worked or not worked. Lucy also asked participants to reflect on some of the following questions: 

• Is this process exploitative or extractive?
• Is my event open and accessible?
• Is my description clear and concise?
• Have I offered something actionable?
• Where do my network and audience intersect?

Open Space

This session was designed to be open in nature, to give people an opportunity to ask questions, to learn about a tool they haven’t used but would like to, to talk about a project they are working on, get support, share ideas and learn from peers. We explored the on-wiki event registration tool, and the process of nominating a featured article or a “Did you Know” Article on the front page of English Wikipedia.

Introduction to Wikidata and batch editing Wikidata using Open Refine

These sessions were led by Dr Sara Thomas and Stuart Prior from WMUK. This session was divided into two strands: Strand 1 aimed at beginners to Wikidata, and Strand 2 to increase existing Wikidata skills in batch editing and item creation using Open Refine. 

The OpenRefine tool has received funding and support from the Foundation, including support for a Train the Trainer programme, which Sara attended, and subsequently is now providing training for Wikimedia UK staff, partners and volunteers.  OpenRefine is a powerful tool with functionality for data cleaning, as well as reconciliation and batch editing and upload to Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.  Whilst it is not a tool for beginners, and requires existing knowledge of Wikidata and Structured Data for Commons, it is a solid option for volunteers and GLAMs looking to work in batch upload and editing. 

Conclusion

It was an inspiring two weeks and it was great to see so much enthusiasm and openness to learning and sharing. Trainers reported they found all aspects of the training useful and that they found the in-person sessions supportive and valuable, as a way of meeting other trainers and sharing ideas and experiences. 

“It was really good to meet up with other trainers and share experiences too.”

 One of our trainers wrote a blog post about the training which can be read here.

Trainers have already started implementing what they have learned from the sessions. We will follow up with participants as to what they need to embed learning as well as additional training going forwards, and look at how WMUK can support that process for them. 

“… I’ve continued to work through the Open Refine work since returning from Leeds.”

“I came away with loads of ideas for planning future engagement with our Wikipedia network and much more confident that this is possible in the time I have available for it. It was also great to hear from other people during the sessions and be inspired by the projects they’re involved in and knowledge they have.”

If you are interested in becoming a WMUK trainer, our next Train the Trainer (for new trainers) will take place in 2025. If you would like to find out more about becoming a WMUK trainer or would like to register your interest email rupal.karia@wikimedia.org.uk.

The post Developing community leaders – investing in our Trainers appeared first on WMUK.

The African Wikipedian Alliance (AWA) hosted two insightful monthly meet-ups for its Francophone community on August 28th and September 30th, 2024. These sessions, facilitated by Azogbonon Constant, Founder of the @pprendre Network, aimed to equip Francophone Wikimedians with practical skills for contributing to Wikivoyage. Dalila Yaro, COPP Community Coordinator, moderated both sessions, bringing together participants from Burundi, Chad, Cameroon, the DRC, Madagascar, Senegal, and Togo.

Key Highlights

The first session, “Introduction à WikiVoyage 101,” held on August 28th, introduced 23 attendees to Wikivoyage’s core functions. Participants learned about the platform’s navigation, article structuring, and key tools to create reliable travel guides. This foundational knowledge set the stage for deeper exploration into Wikivoyage’s unique approach to travel content.

On September 30th, the follow-up session titled “Wikivoyage: Guide pratique pour améliorer les articles” offered advanced techniques to improve article quality. With 14 participants, this session provided hands-on strategies for refining content structure, enhancing readability, and implementing formatting best practices to deliver valuable travel insights.

Conclusion

The AWA Francophone monthly meet-ups empowered participants with essential skills to enrich Francophone travel content on Wikivoyage. By focusing on both foundational and advanced editing techniques, the sessions emphasised accuracy, relevance, and quality in every contribution. Participants were encouraged to continue engaging with the Wikivoyage community, fostering collaborative learning to strengthen Francophone representation on the platform.

For those interested in revisiting the session or those who might have missed it, the recorded version is available on the community programmes page. Ensure you are registered for the upcoming CfA WiR Bi-weekly webinar and immerse in our vibrant community. To stay abreast of our initiatives, complete this form, and let’s shape the future together!

The Wiki Advocates Philippines User Group has joined the global community of Wikidata editors in celebrating its 12th birthday from October 26, 2024 to November 3, 2024. A 5-day event was conducted in the learning hub, including Wikidata editing sessions, basic training for newbies, exploring possibilities of lexemes, and fun interactive games. This celebration was made possible with Wikimedia Deutschland’s support for different communities and affiliates who wanted to organize celebration events. 

As a group, this was the first time we held an edit-a-thon for Wikidata, although some of our volunteers have already started to edit individually based on their interests and capacity. Imelda Brazal started editing as early as 2020 during the 1Lib1Ref campaign, together with other librarians. Anthony has also worked on Wikidata lexemes, transferring the word entries on the Central Bikol Wiktionary to Wikidata. The call for organizers was a good opportunity for the team to make extra effort and time working with this project and also introducing it to newbies. 

Aftermath of Typhoon Kristine

We have managed to run the program smoothly together with the help of our 3 interns and other volunteer organizers under the Hatch-A-Wikimedian program. Initially, this was planned to be conducted in another venue where we could accommodate a larger number of participants, but the Philippines was just then recovering after Typhoon Kristine, and there were major road closures due to heavy flooding, and some areas were inaccessible. Another problem we encountered was that some of the registered participants would not be able to attend the actual session, for they were also recovering from the onslaught of the typhoon. 

Lexemes and Wiktionary Integration

Currently, the Central Bikol Wiktionary has 7,500+ word entries. It was approved in 2020, and although we had used it during editathons and even random searches by end users, we saw that doing some work in Wikidata Lexemes would greatly help our language preservation initiative. Seeing the functionality of lexemes, especially their characteristic of being understandable by programs and language models, we foresee a future wherein we can easily query words based on our needs; machine translations will be more efficient and grammatically correct. Seeing that we can manage to organize this event with the help of the Wikidata Birthday support fund given by Wikimedia Deutschland, we pursue working with Wikidata Lexemes, particularly in the Central Bikol language. 

Event Highlights

We conducted our kick-off on October 27, where we included sessions on introduction to Wikidata, a 3-hour edit-a-thon, and also a simple celebration through the “Guess the Answer through a Book Title” game and afternoon snacks. The days between October 28-30 were scheduled for an open house and also online promotion of our event through our social media account. During these 3 days, volunteer editors were invited to visit our learning hub, where they could do edits on Wikidata and watch tutorial videos. The closing program was on October 31, where we awarded the top 4 editors during the entire 5-day celebration. The closing program was scheduled from afternoon to late evening, where we played different team and individual games, had dinner, each with a slice of the Wikidata cake, and shared our experiences and learnings from the 5-day training. 

The Hangor Tool was able to track 1066 lexemes, and 900+ of those are new entries. We were also able to create 31 items and edit 63 of them. More detailed results can be checked on our Wikidata editing dashboard. 

Learnings

This was the first time we worked on Wikidata. Although the focus of this event is on Wikidata Lexemes, we have also incorporated sessions that tackle the basics of Wikidata. Participants were taught how to add items; in this case, we utilized local literary books. They were also taught the difference between the Wiktionary and Wikidata Lexemes and how to integrate both. We observed an interest in working with Wikidata among the participants, considering that it has an easy template for editing, as compared to other Wiki projects that require coding for some instances or drafting articles, which consumes a lot of time and would need proper research before even being published. 

To add, since we used local literary books, the participants and volunteers were engaged in reading. Knowing the title of the book, the publisher, the ISBN, and even the number of pages led them to discover more about the book and eventually try to engage in reading. 

We run several campaigns in our annual activities concerning gender equality, human rights, language preservation, and leadership development. For the past years, we were able to utilize the Wikimedia Incubator project in developing our new language projects and also improved the quality of word entries in our Central Bikol Wiktionary. The Wikidata Birthday celebration has opened a lot of ideas for the work we will be doing in the upcoming months. We expect to explore the project more, learn from experienced Wikidata editors, and collaborate with existing or new projects until we can also share with the global community our learnings and expertise in Wikidata editing. 

We are happy to announce that, for the first time, Wikimedia communities of Central Asia will unite at the Central Asian WikiCon 2025! 

Central Asian WikiCon 2025 will be hosted at Diplomat International School on April 19–20, 2025, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Diplomat International School is a prestigious non-governmental educational institution in Tashkent. Opened in 2018, the school features two modern educational buildings and ranks among the top 10 non-state educational institutions in Tashkent. The conference will be organized by the Wikimedians of Uzbek Language User Group.

This landmark event, supported by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Conference Fund, will bring together over 50 Wikimedians from Central Asia, and nearby regions to share knowledge, collaborate, and grow the Wikimedia movement.

The first-ever regional conference in Central Asia aims to strengthen connections among Wikimedia communities from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, and surrounding areas. The event’s main goals are to raise awareness about the Wikimedia movement and foster collaboration.  

Through interactive workshops, participants will develop editing, project management, and technical skills while discussing key regional challenges and future initiatives. Networking sessions will provide opportunities for building stronger partnerships across borders. This conference is an exciting step towards a more unified and impactful future for Wikimedia in Central Asia.

On behalf of the Core Organizing Team 

Translation of technical terms was the topic for the first community consultant meeting organized by the Language Diversity Hub. This is a service the LDH intends to offer for communities that are experiencing challenges related to being new in the Wikiverse. The idea was born out of something that was shared with me by Amir Aharoni, a member of both the WMF Language Team and the Language Committee. I think we were discussing how he could help even more communities with their challenges, and he said something along the lines of “in order to scale this work, I have to be cloned.” For years, these words have been coming back to me, because I believe it is true for many skills and competences in the movement, certain things are just too complex for many people to learn, and we end up relying on a (too) small group of key persons to solve the same or similar problems again and again.

With the community consultations we attempt a bleak version of cloning: we record the sessions, document what has been discussed, and then look for ways to disseminate the knowledge. Through this we hope to achieve two things: the first is that we get a panel of expert mentors together, with a mix of skills that complement eachother. This can be more efficient for the community, but we also believe it is rewarding for the experts. After all, most Wikimedians enjoy spending time and learning from each other. So we hope that these calls are enjoyable and useful both for the community and for the mentors. 

The second benefit is that the LDH takes responsibility for organizing and documenting the meeting. This means that we take the job of finding times and coordinating between all participants, as well as recording the meeting, taking notes and finding ways to disseminate the knowledge. The interest of the LDH is to curate the shared knowledge in a way that it can be of use for many more people. Maybe cloning our mentors would be more efficient, but at least this approach is both doable and ethical.   

The very first community consultation was with the Dagbani community, a creative and ambitious community. Did you know they have been creating a TV-show to teach people about Wikipedia? It is called Saha Wikipedia and have 30 minutes segments aired in primetime on Saturday afternoons on a local TV-channel.

However, currently the Dagbani community is in the process of implementing Wikifunctions on their Wikipedia. This is a complex technical process, but it also provides linguistic challenges when it comes to translating the technical terms. The advice provided by the mentors Amir, Jon Harald and Kimberli all came back to the importance of understanding what the terms really means, what is the word’s, or the function that the word describes, role on the site? Only when you can fully understand the function of the term, will you be able to connect it with possible existing terms, or create a good term for the future.

Translating MediaWiki is something all new language communities have to go through and here are some general advice provided by the mentors:

1. You need to fully understand the word you are translating. 

This means you have to understand the function that the word describes in all the different settings it is being used. Sometimes this means you have to dive deep into why the word was used in English the first place. For example, think about the term “edit source”. When the visual editor was added, there were many editors that preferred to stay with wikitext, so the meaning of “edit source” is to edit in wikitext instead of editing with the visual editor. The Dagbani community shared that their translation of “Edit source” was more a direct translation of the word “source”.

The advice from Amir is to discuss the meaning of the words in the community language, to build a solid understanding of it and maybe then the words will appear in the discussions. In several Sámi languages they use an adapted version of the word “wikitext” instead of “source” for that particular translation.

2. Think of the users when you create a translation. 

Will this word make sense for a grandmother? A teenager? A person with little technical skills? The better words you are able to coin, the easier it will be for new users to learn and get comfortable on the platform. 

3. Look for similar words in your culture. 

While the technology is new to the culture, there might be terms that covered similar functions in the real world that can be reused. One of my favorite examples is again from the Sámi translations, where they are using the word for “earmark” of the reindeers to translate the english word “tag”. 

4. Transliteration is OK!

It is OK to use loanwords from English, and adapt them to your language. Sometimes that is the best option, and it certainly does not ruin a language. The most important point of translating is that the users or readers can understand and navigate their way around the platform. 

To dive more into this topic i recommend reading Amir’s excellent blog post on this topic. you can also watch the recorded call on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QOPSHGm0tW8

Mistakes will be made, all the mentors shared experiences of translating words that they later did not fully understand themselves. The good news it that the translations are not set in stone! just like all the other Wikimedia-projects this is work that continues to grow and improve through the continuous dedication of us all.

Would you like a community consultation?

It does not need to be about translations, but can be anything you and your community would like to have some mentorship.  Request a meeting here, and we will follow up.

Would you like to mentor someone? You can E-mail us at: wikimedialanguagediversityhub@gmail.com

Feel free to sign up to the Language Diversity Hub mailinglist too.

On August 27th, August 28th, and September 26th, 2024, Code for Africa’s African Wikipedian Alliance (AWA) held a series of bi-weekly webinars to introduce the Anglophone community to editing and documentation techniques on Wikisource. Led by facilitators Alice Kibombo, Senior Programmes Officer, Libraries at Wikimedia Foundation, and Divine G. Nanteza of the Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda, the sessions attracted over 80 participants from Burundi, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. Moderated by Bukola James, AWA Community Coordinator, the webinars provided participants with valuable insights into effective contributions on Wikisource, from basic proofreading to advanced content preservation.

Key Highlights

The series commenced with “Introduction to Wikisource,” which saw 25 participants engage in foundational skills crucial for effective contributions. Participants explored Wikisource’s purpose, interface, and editing policies. This session emphasised navigating the platform, performing simple edits, and using advanced tools for significant contributions. Following this, the second session, “Performing Major Edits on Wikisource,” attracted 30 attendees and focused on proofreading, validation techniques, and the importance of maintaining content quality. The series concluded with “Wikisource: Identifying Books and Publications for Documentation,” where Divine enlightened  29 participants on the process of uploading printed works under open licences and the types of publications suitable for digitization on Wikisource.

Conclusion

These webinars emphasised the significance of Wikisource as a platform for preserving and sharing culturally relevant content and provided participants with essential skills for effective contributions. By engaging with proofreading, validation, and having a clear knowledge about open licensing, attendees left the sessions well-prepared to enrich Wikisource with accessible, high-quality printed publications. Participants are encouraged to continue applying their knowledge to expand the platform’s repository and contribute meaningfully to open-access content.

For those interested in revisiting the session or those who might have missed it, the recorded version is available on the community programmes page. Ensure you are registered for the upcoming AWA Bi-weekly webinar and immerse in our vibrant community. To stay abreast of our initiatives, complete this form, and let’s shape the future together!

I routinely point out in my outdoor naturalist explorations that one of the great innovations in evolutionary history is indirect communication - communication via the substrate - rather one-to-one communication. What this does is to make the information more permanent and less vulnerable to the death of individual organisms. It is the reason why you cannot destroy an ant colony by stomping on the workers walking on a trail. 

You might see that to some extent this is what internet forums do, or what books do, they pass on information even after the death of the originator. But books are not location specific, I cannot find out who has walked at a specific spot, the way a dog or tiger might find out by sniffing a tree. Books are not sensitive to temporality - the dog or tiger might find out by the scents left on a tree how recent the last passer by was.

Social insects like ants and termites have evolved indirect communication to coordinate the activities of individual organisms without the need for centralized command and control. The terms stigmergy and stigmergic collaboration have been used for this and here is an explanation I found online (slightly edited):

The word stigmergy comes from the Greek stigma, meaning sign/mark, and ergon, meaning work, capturing the notion that the environment is a stimulus that causes particular work (behavior) to occur. It was originally coined by zoologist Pierre-Paul Grassé,who explained the mound-building behavior of termites by appealing to the stigmergic control of the mound itself.

So if a termite mound is breached - the workers passing by might use a chemical marker saying - there is a breach here - as more and more workers pass the point, the chemical scent becomes stronger and it recruits workers who specialize in fixing breaches to the specific breach location. Workers might also mark trails towards the breach for others to follow. Once the breach is sealed, the trail scents and breach indicators fade away, leaving workers to follow their other activities. Notice that there is no central control and that chemical markers of different kinds may be produced by agents who may not know how to deal with the specific situation. Agents that do know how to deal with the situation are guided to a specific location. 

Insect societies have task specialization - some workers specialize in foraging, some in nest care, some in defense and so on. Task specialization is sometimes based on the age of the insects, with older ones taking up risky activities.

I have tried to explain how this might or should guide construction of software such as the MediaWiki system - but evidently with little success - among some in the Wikipedia community. Agents need to be able to indicate centrally about areas of Wikipedia that are undergoing disturbance. Other agents need to be able to find, act at the areas of disturbance. Currently Wikipedia does this through central bulletin boards where agents explicitly post their notices. Unfortunately this is too taxing for a naive agent. WikiRage was a third party system that could detect increased editing activity and show articles that were currently "hot". There is no real-time system that shows currently highly visited articles. There is no system for currently highly sought after article - although this might be something for a search engine company like Google/Bing to think of. Now look at this also from the point of view of an agent with specialization - I as an editor might only act if I know that I can help, so overwhelming me with too many stimuli might only push an agent like me into confusion and inaction. If I were a specialist editor working in a particular cluster of articles, I should be able to filter out and indicate only if there is a rise in activity within articles in my cluster of interest. Ideally I shouldn't have to declare my own interest explicitly but article clusters should be determined from linkages or past editing history and so on. For a while now I have sought a rather simple means to detect traffic spikes in articles that I have on my watchlist. Now some software designers will immediately object that such as system could impinge on user privacy - although much of this information (other than mere reading) is already public in the MediaWiki system. I think many of these security concerns can be reduced by "aging" - the deletion of data over time - to simulate the dispersal of scents in social insects. Further such a system could perhaps be designed as a browser plugin, keeping data entirely local and off from the center. For instance if I wanted to look at what is hot on my watchlist - I could easily do with some kind of coloring and sorting of entries on my watchlist with a factor  = yesterday's (or the last available) traffic / (average of the previous N days of traffic) [dealing of course with division by zero etc.] - that might help me narrow down my responsiveness to improve articles that I have an interest in. It would also make the system more responsive to user needs.

A super-organism - the term used for colonies of social insects - needs to have mechanisms for how its agents act as sensors, how those sensations are quantitatively expressed, how those quantitative expressions tip thresholds that drive actions or reaction.

Note: I have been bumbling with these ideas for a while and my knowledge of software development for implementing this particular idea has been rather limiting. I hope some talented software developer feels inspired to create something along these lines. I for one would be grateful for it! 

PS: WikiRage went defunct and there is now a site called WikiShark which gives trending pages globally (for the English Wikipedia) but there is still a role as mentioned above for what is trending in what one can contribute to - ie based on task specialization.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• A new version of the standard wikitext editor-mode syntax highlighter will be available as a beta feature later this week. This brings many new features and bug fixes, including right-to-left support, template folding, autocompletion, and an improved search panel. You can learn more on the help page.
• The 2010 wikitext editor now supports common keyboard shortcuts such Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+I for italics. A full list of all six shortcuts is available. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. [1]
• Starting November 28, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: bswiki, elwiki, euwiki, fawiki, fiwiki, frwikiquote, frwikisource, frwikiversity, frwikivoyage, idwiki, lvwiki, plwiki, ptwiki, urwiki, viwikisource, zhwikisource. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF).
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a user creating a new AbuseFilter can now only set the filter to “protected” if it includes a protected variable.

Updates for technical contributors

• The CodeEditor, which can be used in JavaScript, CSS, JSON, and Lua pages, now offers live autocompletion. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. The feature can be temporarily disabled on a page by pressing Ctrl+, and un-selecting “Live Autocompletion”.
• Tool-maintainers who use the Graphite system for tracking metrics, need to migrate to the newer Prometheus system. They can check this dashboard and the list in the Description of the task T350592 to see if their tools are listed, and they should claim metrics and dashboards connected to their tools. They can then disable or migrate all existing metrics by following the instructions in the task. The Graphite service will become read-only in April. [2]
• The New PreProcessor parser performance report has been fixed to give an accurate count for the number of Wikibase entities accessed. It had previously been resetting after 400 entities. [3]

Meetings and events

• A Language community meeting will take place November 29 at 16:00 UTC. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Mooré Wikipedia, the language support track at Wiki Indaba, and a report from the Wayuunaiki community on their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community over the last 3 years. This meeting will be in English and will also have Spanish interpretation.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation from November 7 to November 21, 2024. Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta. Let askcac@wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!

Upcoming and current events and conversations

Talking: 2024 continues

• Conversation with the trustees: Speak directly with the Wikimedia Foundation trustees about their work at the next Conversation with the Trustees on 27 November from 12:00 – 13:30 UTC.
• Wikimedia Hackathon: Registration is now open for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon which will be held in Istanbul, Turkey, May 2–4, 2025.
• Language Community: The next language community meeting will be held on November 29 at 16:00 UTC.
• Wikimania 2025: Application for scholarship to attend Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi is open until the end of December 8.
• Central Asian WikiCon: The Central Asian WikiCon 2025 will take place on April 19–20, 2025, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Applications to be part of the Program and Scholarship Committee is open until November 30.

Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure

See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

• Tech News: Admins and users of the Wikimedia projects where Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator’s actions; Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. Learn about the latest tech updates from tech news 45, 46, and 47.
• Wikifunctions: Wikifunctions now has a new Type: rational numbers. They expand the ability to deal with numbers considerably, allowing us to work with fractions and decimals, and not just whole numbers anymore. More status updates.
• Temporary accounts: We are rolling out temporary accounts for unregistered (logged-out) editors for more wikis including Romanian, Serbian, Danish, and Norwegian Bokmål.

Annual Goals Progress on Equity

See also a list of all movement events: on Meta-Wiki

• Language & Internationalization: The fifth edition of the Language & Internationalization newsletter is available. Some key highlights: Mooré Wikipedia is live; Keyboard Layouts for Multiple Languages Added; New Projects Added to Translatewiki.net.
• Wikimedia Research Showcase: Watch the latest showcase which looked at external factors that help different language versions of Wikipedia thrive.
• Wikipedia Library: What’s new in the Wikipedia Library?
• Tulu Wikisource: Welcoming Tulu Wikisource.
• CEE Meeting 2024: Highlights from Central Asian community members at the CEE Meeting 2024.
• Let’s Connect: Let’s Connect Learning clinic on Gender Sensitivity Training within Wikimedia communities was held on November 22.

Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness

See also: quarterly Metrics Reports

• Audit reports 2023-24: Highlights from the fiscal year 2023–2024 Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Endowment audit reports.
• Wikimedia Enterprise: Financial report of Wikimedia Enterprise for the fiscal year 2023–2024.

Board and Board committee updates

See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter

• Board Updates: The Board met in Katowice, Poland on August 5 and held its quarterly business meeting before Wikimania. Learn more about the outcomes of the meeting.
• AffCom: The Affiliates Committee has resumed User Group recognition work after a pause to improve the User Group recognition process.

Other Movement curated newsletters & news

See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · other newsletters:

• Topics: Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library
• Wikimedia Projects: Milestones · Wikidata
• Regions: Central and Eastern Europe

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The Wikisource Loves Manuscripts (WiLMa) initiative was inspired by the Balinese community’s mission to preserve their manuscript heritage. With support from the Internet Archive, they digitized around 3,000 lontar manuscripts, which represented approximately 90% of Bali’s literature. Later, PanLex was brought in to build an on-screen Balinese keyboard so that anyone could easily transcribe the manuscripts. Eventually, the community identified Wikisource as a more sustainable platform with existing communities that could be engaged in their mission. In 2021, Balinese Wikisource was launched. This 10-year effort by the Balinese community suggested that the digitization and transcription of manuscripts could help to bring underrepresented languages to the Internet. The Wikimedia Foundation wanted to explore what kinds of support could help to accelerate and grow such projects. 

Scaling the approach in Indonesia

In February 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a pilot in two more Indonesian languages along with Balinese, in partnership with Pusat Pengkajian Islam dan Masyarakat (PPIM), a research institute based in Jakarta, and Wikimedia Indonesia. The pilot not only focused on digitizing manuscripts from three major islands of Indonesia but also sought to engage Wikimedia communities to transcribe the manuscripts on Wikisource. Additional capacities were brought to the project, through partnerships, leading to co-organized events with the UNESCO Jakarta Office; a content donation from the British Library; a technical partnership with READ-COOP to use their text recognition tool, Transkribus; and communications support from Indonesian media house, Tempo.

In February 2024, the WiLMa pilot concluded, having digitized 28,000 manuscript pages, which was 42% more than the _target. PPIM then hosted a series of follow-up proofreading workshops in Jakarta, Yogyakarta and West Sumatra, to further engage students and language learners in each of the languages.

Here is what a participant shared after participating in one such workshop:

Hopefully Wikisource can become a digital forum to make it easier to study and research manuscripts

Improving Wikisource infrastructure to support complex documents

The Wikimedia Foundation also partnered with a team at IIIT Hyderabad, India, to test the efficacy of Transkribus and build an initial Balinese Transkribus model. The Foundation also contracted two fellows to provide further technical support to the Wikisource community, most notably integrating Transrkibus into Wikimedia OCR. After several unsuccessful attempts to create a Transkribus model for Javanese handwritten manuscripts, we followed the recommendation of User:Bennylin, a Javanese contributor and pivoted to creating a Transkribus model for printed Javanese documents. One of the Javanese editors reflected that the print model is “pretty good but I hope it will be better”.

Spreading the spirit of Wikisource Loves Manuscripts  

In October 2023, we selected 22 people (from more than 120 applicants) to join a global Learning Partners Network to share insights and resources from the pilot in Indonesia, such as manuscript digitization guidelines. 12 participants successfully completed the 6-month training and follow-up projects are already underway:

• Irvin Sto. Tomas from the PhilWiki Community UG engaged his community to grow the Wikisource community in the Philippines. Due to their efforts, Bikol Central Wikisource was launched in October 2024.
• Assamese contributor Animesh secured Wikimedia Foundation funding for a pilot project to document and digitize ancient manuscripts. Read more about Animesh’s aspirations for the project in this interview.

Another exciting development is that two allied entities, Archive Nepal and Jadavpur University’s School of Cultural Texts and Records, were funded in the latest round of the Knowledge Equity Fund to work with manuscripts on Wikisource.

On the other hand, launched in April 2024, Malay Wikisource community has also been focusing on bringing Malay manuscripts online.

Finally, there is an exciting update from where this all started; Bali. The Balinese community is planning a multi-year project to document all of the Balinese manuscripts held in institutions around the world. Their grant proposal WikiSami: Sum of All Manuscripts Bali is currently under review with the ESEAP regional fund committee.

As search engines ferry us to Wikipedia articles and most AI tools are trained on its content, the work to fill in gaps on Wikipedia with well-sourced, high-quality information is more important than ever. Thanks to the increased support of the Guru Krupa Foundation (GKF), 1,875 students at universities and colleges across the U.S. will join these critical efforts to improve Wikipedia’s STEM content while developing their research, writing, and digital media literacy skills along the way.

“Giving college students an opportunity to curate Wikipedia STEM articles (by verifying research references and adding to the articles), is an excellent way to introduce them to the scientific research process and incubate their interest in STEM,” said Mukund Padmanabhan, President of Guru Krupa Foundation. “These articles also then become a credible and valuable source of information, provided in accessible, easy-to-read formats, that benefit the public worldwide. This project preserves existing knowledge and encourages higher study among students — both of which align with GKF goals. We are happy to continue extending our support for this project for the third year.”

Wikipedia remains one of the most visited and influential platforms for sharing information about science; the readership of its science articles far exceeds that of traditional scientific publications. Moreover, the content on Wikipedia can directly impact the conceptual and semantic structures in the scientific literature, a relationship underscored by Neil Thompson’s research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

With the support of the Guru Krupa Foundation and the framework of the Wikipedia assignment, students will research STEM topics to identify and fill the gaps on Wikipedia, writing new articles and enhancing existing coverage of science information. Collectively, they will create or improve more than 1,500 Wikipedia articles, adding 200,000 words across the online encyclopedia that will be read by millions.

Since 2016, more than 60,000 students studying STEM have added nearly 53 million words to Wikipedia as part of Wiki Education’s Communicating Science Initiative, thanks to the generous support of the Guru Krupa Foundation and our other dedicated partners. The students’ collective work on Wikipedia has been viewed more than 3 billion times! 

We express our deep gratitude to the Guru Krupa Foundation for their continued commitment to enhancing both student learning and public access to high-quality STEM information for the benefit of all.

Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada. 

How many times did you look up something on your phone today? Did you ask ChatGPT a question? How about Alexa or Siri or a social media site? 

Receiving immediate responses is a huge benefit of how this technology has improved our lives. But it has also made it harder to sort through a flood of information to make sure we are getting the most accurate and reliable answers. The overwhelming speed of change in today’s online information ecosystem makes it more urgent to have a place for trustworthy and verified facts. 

Wikipedia was created more than 20 years ago with that goal in mind. Edited by nearly 260,000 volunteers globally, it now receives more than 15 billion visits each month. Wikipedia sees the same (if not higher) levels of global traffic as well-known, for-profit internet companies at a fraction of the budget and staffing. It’s the only top ten most visited website hosted by a nonprofit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation. 

Since becoming CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2022, I’ve asked hundreds of people all over the world how they think Wikipedia works. This usually leads to a conversation where someone says: 

“I sometimes see that message asking for donations, but I hadn’t thought about the fact that there are no ads until now.” 

“I had no idea Wikipedia was supported by a non-profit.”

“I use Wikipedia every day. I can’t imagine a world in which it doesn’t exist.”

They usually leave the conversation understanding why the Wikimedia Foundation’s work is vitally important for ‘the encyclopedia that anyone can edit’ to remain freely available to people everywhere.

The Wikimedia Foundation does four critical things to make sure Wikipedia can get closer to its vision of representing the sum of all knowledge. (1) We provide a highly sophisticated technology backbone that keeps Wikipedia secure, fast, and accessible all over the world; (2) we innovate in the latest technologies to deliver accurate, up-to-date Wikipedia content to you, even when you are using other sites online; (3) we help fight misinformation, disinformation, censorship, and other threats; and most importantly, (4) we support volunteers in all regions of the world to build thriving communities of editors and contributors. These people brought Wikipedia to the world more than 20 years ago with a radical belief that humans remain at the core of realizing technology’s promise.

What does all of this take?

1. A sophisticated technology backbone to keep Wikipedia secure, fast, and accessible

It may surprise you to learn that Wikipedia is recognized as one of the fastest sites in the United States. Fast and reliable access to Wikipedia’s website should not have to depend on where you live. The Wikimedia Foundation continues to grow this technology backbone to deliver a similar experience to users across the Middle East, Africa, South America, Asia, and Europe. 

This essential infrastructure has expanded over the years to handle extreme spikes in global traffic. These spikes can happen when there is a significant newsworthy event, such as when a famous person dies. In these moments, we see countless other sites begin to simultaneously pull up-to-the-second information from Wikipedia because it is the source they trust. This in turn creates increased pressure on our technology backbone to keep the site up and running when people need it most. Our engineers pride themselves on making sure Wikipedia doesn’t go down.

We manage to do this with two data centers, five caching centers, and over 30 internet peering and transit connections, all supported by about two thousand servers (we run our own servers for lots of reasons, but especially to protect user privacy). This supports the website and also other digital properties like mobile apps.

But the real investment is in supporting our hundreds of engineers. They write complex code in the open, make hard trade-offs to balance spikes in incoming traffic, and add new databases when needed. They handle the often invisible but critical maintenance of software from reducing memory consumption to fixing bugs to removing code that threatens the security and safety of our systems. 

The Wikimedia Foundation must continue to invest in the security, speed, and reliability of Wikipedia. This lean and highly sophisticated backbone is operated by mission-driven technologists who are utterly dedicated to making sure Wikipedia is always up and running for the billions of visitors that have come to depend on it as always being a click away.

2. Making Wikipedia content available anywhere on the internet

Most people I meet don’t know that the content they use all over the internet comes from Wikipedia, even if they never visit our website. Where does Google get the link to answer your query? Have you ever asked Siri or Alexa where they found the answer? Do you know that ChatGPT and similar tools are all trained on Wikipedia’s data? 

This phenomenon was captured well in a New York Times Magazine story that described Wikipedia as “a kind of factual netting that holds the whole digital world together.” Search engines depend heavily on Wikipedia’s up-to-date articles; video sites point users to Wikipedia to learn more information; and AI chatbots regularly pull from Wikipedia in generating their responses. How does Wikipedia keep up, while staying true to our purpose and values? 

It’s not easy, and this drives a lot of the growing investments we are making now at the Wikimedia Foundation. We are doubling down on protecting user data and privacy, bucking many industry trends. We are doubling down on keeping our content available at no cost to everyone, everywhere, under what is known as a free license. And most importantly, we are doubling down on a belief that high-quality, human-generated content is going to be irreplaceable for generative AI tools like ChatGPT. 

We’ve been reflecting a lot on this last topic. As longtime Wikipedia watcher and Slate reporter Stephen Harrison put it: “the implementation of A.I. technology will undoubtedly alter how Wikipedia is used and transform the user experience. At the same time, the features and bugs of large language models, or LLMs, like ChatGPT intersect with human interests in ways that support Wikipedia rather than threaten it.”  At the Wikimedia Foundation, this has meant continuously investing in AI and machine learning, while always making sure that humans remain a central part of the equation.

Another area for increased investment is in tools that the Foundation created to help volunteer editors translate articles across languages. As the most multilingual digital enterprise in the world, Wikipedia and its sister projects support content creation in more than 300 languages. 

Meeting Wikimedia’s global mission requires ongoing creativity and innovation in translation across languages and cultural contexts. This started years ago with a content translation tool that is regularly maintained and improved; it has been used to translate more than 2 million of the nearly 64 million Wikipedia articles so far. We added resources last year to launch this into a translation service called MinT (“Machine in Translation”) that is designed to support underserved languages that are using machine translation for the first time. MinT adds bi-directional translation between 155 languages to Wikipedia using an open source language translation model, greatly simplifying the process for editors who translate content to and from these languages. This includes supporting machine translation in Fula for the first time, a language spoken by around 35 million people in West and Central Africa.

Alongside all of this, we have year-in-year-out costs that are required to keep Wikipedia’s ‘factual netting’ healthy and strong. Recently, this has meant making user-guided improvements to the usability of our website for readers. And prioritizing the needs of volunteer editors and technical contributors globally — ranging from customized software, personalized tools, specific bug fixes, and sometimes individualized patches across 300+ languages and in all regions of the world! 

This is why we readily spend most of our roughly $189 million budget on growing teams of world-class engineers, designers, product managers, researchers, and analysts who are up to this monumental task: building a world in which every human being can share in the sum of all knowledge.

3. Fighting mis/disinformation, censorship, and other threats

Most of us have seen or experienced first-hand the negative consequences of misinformation, polarization, and censorship online. These harmful realities, along with threats to our personal data and privacy, often leave us to fend for ourselves. For me, that’s why Wikipedia’s goal to provide evidence-based, unbiased, and free information for everyone has never been more urgent. 

Wikipedia’s volunteers are the world’s first line of defense. Last year, I told government leaders that the day-to-day process of building and improving Wikipedia requires these contributors to collaborate, debate, and discuss their edits in order to write thoughtful, informative articles. They hold themselves to high standards of reliability, verifiability, and neutrality by providing citations and sources. On the “Talk” page of every Wikipedia article, they weigh multiple perspectives in the open so that they can make good faith decisions about content together. And they set and enforce rules for what does and doesn’t belong on the Wikimedia projects, guided by a Universal Code of Conduct and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation’s commitment to human rights standards.

This requires expanding our legal, policy, and advocacy strategies to push back against a trend of increasing authoritarianism and government censorship (including blocks of Wikipedia itself, which we helped overturn in Turkey); promoting responsible regulations to support open access to knowledge in legislation like the Digital Services Act; and when necessary, defending volunteers in countries where contributing to Wikipedia remains an act of bravery. 

In today’s world, we see that it is getting harder to ensure that technology serves people, not the other way around. 

I believe that this work of the Wikimedia Foundation — promoting the values of open and equitable access to knowledge to people and societies everywhere — must be supported now more than ever before.

4. Supporting volunteers to build thriving communities of contributors

The Wikimedia Foundation is part of an extensive ecosystem of communities that also includes local chapters representing countries, user groups of volunteers with common interests, allied partners who advocate for open knowledge, and individuals editing Wikipedia who often have no idea that any of this even exists behind the online platform.

One of the most important tasks of the Wikimedia Foundation is to share the financial support we receive with these individuals, groups, and organizations around the world to collectively build thriving communities of contributors. This requires operating a very complex administrative and financial infrastructure that can fund 90+ countries – one that is annually given the highest possible ratings from independent watchdogs like Charity Navigator.

With the guidance of volunteer committees, we balance funding priorities between deeper innovations in more established regions with high-scale growth efforts in newer communities like Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, closing what we call ‘knowledge gaps’ is a strategic goal of our movement; just one example of this is the collective efforts of countless individuals and organizations to increase the representation of women’s biographies on Wikipedia.

The goal of this work is to invite anyone who shares our vision and values to join us. This extends from welcoming newcomers to supporting more established editors; it can take the form of a small donation to an individual to a large, multi-year grant enabling a chapter to grow its local activities; and it can support partnerships with hundreds of educational and cultural institutions around the world. 

It means meeting people where they are, and not expecting them to find us. I think about recent grants that have supported co-creating open knowledge projects with the Atikamekw First Nation in Canada; addressing gender gaps with US-based Art+Feminism; edit-a-thons in Japan; the development of Kyrgyz Wikipedia in Central Europe; building the base of Wikimedia contributors in Nigeria; and helping teachers use Wikipedia in the classroom in Morocco.

The people who do all this can’t be seen on your computer screen, but they power the human world of Wikipedia, one that makes everything else I’ve talked about here possible.

… 

I hope this explanation helps you to better understand what the Wikimedia Foundation does, especially when we ask you to donate. 

By design, we don’t only ask a privileged few to write us big checks. That’s because Wikipedia belongs to everyone, and why people are asked to contribute what they can if they’ve found it useful. This funding, given by only 2% of readers, helps keep the site ad-free and independent. 

As you’ve read, the Wikimedia Foundation has grown to meet technical, geographic, and social changes that are only accelerating their pace of change. Alongside today’s investments, we are also planning for the future – by doing things like growing an endowment to accelerate technical innovation and making big bets to reimagine the role of language on the internet. If you agree that this work is important, please consider supporting the Wikimedia Foundation. 

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, representing the best of human knowledge. It is not a social media platform or an opinion page. Nothing quite like it exists anywhere. And it belongs to all of us.

… 

Maryana Iskander is Chief Executive Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation.

If you’d like to support our work, you can make a donation at donate.wikimedia.org.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on 30 October 2023. It was updated with more recent information in November 2024.

Related resources

7 reasons you should donate to Wikipedia

The Wikimedia Foundation ensures that every donation we receive is invested back into serving Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects, and our free knowledge mission. 

Read more

Wikipedia’s value in the age of generative AI

If there was a generative artificial intelligence system that could, on its own, write all the information contained in Wikipedia, would it be the same as Wikipedia today?

Read more

20 years of the nonprofit behind Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an indispensable part of the internet — no matter if you’re searching for a fact to win a round of trivia or doing a deep dive on what’s happening in the world around you.

Read more

The post Love Wikipedia? Get to know the nonprofit behind it appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.

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People give to Wikipedia for many different reasons. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, ensures that every donation we receive is invested back into serving Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects, and our free knowledge mission.

While many visit Wikipedia on a daily basis, it’s not always obvious what it takes to make that visit possible. Here are 7 reasons to donate to the Foundation that also clarify who we are, what we do, and why your donations matter: 

1. We’re a nonprofit, and readers and donors around the world keep us independent.

Many people are surprised to learn that Wikipedia is hosted by a nonprofit organization. It is actually the only website in the top-ten most-visited global websites to be run by a nonprofit. That’s important because we are not funded by advertising, we don’t charge a subscription fee, and we don’t sell your data. The majority of our funding comes from donations ($11 is the average) from people who read Wikipedia. Many see fundraising messages on Wikipedia and give through those. This model preserves our independence by reducing the ability of any one organization or person to influence the content on Wikipedia.

We’ve long-followed industry best practices for nonprofits and have consistently received the highest ratings by nonprofit groups like Charity Navigator for financial efficiency and transparency. We also publish annual reports about our finances and fundraising that are open for anyone to review.

2.  Wikipedia serves millions of readers and runs at a fraction of the cost of other top websites. 

Wikipedia is viewed more than 15 billion times every month. We have the same (if not higher) levels of global traffic as many other for-profit internet companies at a fraction of the budget and staffing. 

Nearly 650 people work at the Wikimedia Foundation. The majority work in product and technology ensuring quick load times, secure connections, and better reading and editing experiences on our sites. They maintain the software and infrastructure on which we operate some of the world’s most multilingual sites with knowledge available in over 300 languages. While our mission and work are unique, by comparison, Google’s translation tool currently supports 243 languages; Meta has more than 70,000 employees; and Reddit has about 2,000 employees.

3. Reader donations support the technology that makes Wikipedia possible and improvements to how people read, edit, and share knowledge on Wikipedia.

Around half of our budget goes directly towards maintaining Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. This supports the technical infrastructure that allows billions of visits to Wikipedia monthly, including a new data center in Brazil that decreased loading times across Latin America. It also supports the staff who play a vital role in contributing to the maintenance of our systems, including site reliability engineering, software engineering, security, and other roles.

Because Wikipedia is available in over 300 languages, it needs top-notch multilingual technology to ensure readers and editors can view and contribute knowledge in their preferred language. Funding also helps with improvements to the user experience on Wikipedia and supporting the growth of global volunteer editor communities to increase knowledge on the site, so that it remains relevant, accurate, and useful.

4. We’re evolving to meet new needs in a changing technology landscape and respond to new global threats.

If you regularly visited Wikipedia in our first decade, there was a good chance you’d get an error message at some point. Because of our steady investments in technology, that’s no longer the case—Wikipedia now handles record-breaking spikes in traffic with ease, preventing any disruption to the reading or editing experience. 

We’re also adapting to meet new challenges, including sophisticated disinformation tactics and threats of government censorship, as well as cybersecurity attacks and changes to how the internet is governed. New security protocols limit the potential for attackers to take advantage of our sites, while our legal staff help to protect our free knowledge mission.

More than half of our traffic now comes from mobile devices. AI training models, voice-activated devices, and websites increasingly leverage Wikipedia to serve their users’ knowledge needs. We’re continuing to evolve to meet these preferences, including developing new experiments to learn more about how to reach new generations of readers and contributors in a changing internet.

5. We manage our finances responsibly and balance Wikipedia’s immediate needs with long-term sustainability.

You probably don’t use your checking account in the same way you use a savings account. One is probably for more day-to-day expenses and the other is likely for emergencies, like if your car suddenly breaks down, or for long-term financial goals, like retirement.  

It’s similar for nonprofits. We have two accounts that act like savings accounts for us. Our reserve is like a rainy day fund for emergencies, such as an economic crisis. 

Our endowment is a long-term permanent fund. The investment income from the endowment supports the future of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. These funds are set aside for particular long-term purposes. However, we use the vast majority of the donations we receive from Wikipedia readers to support the current work we are doing that year.

Sustaining healthy financial reserves and having a working capital policy is considered a best practice for organizations of all types. The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Directors defined our working capital policy to sustain our work and provide support to volunteers and Wikimedia affiliates—a global network of groups that support Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects, and the mission globally. It is also designed to cover unplanned expenses, emergencies, or revenue shortfalls. The policy enables us to have sufficient cashflow to cover our expenses throughout the year.

6. Supporting Wikipedia means you’re helping it become more representative of all the world’s knowledge.

The Wikimedia Foundation supports individuals and organizations around the world with funding to increase the diversity, reach, quality, and quantity of free knowledge on Wikipedia. Over the last four years, we have given over $55 million to members of the volunteer Wikimedia community in over 90 countries. 

While we recognize there are still big gaps to fill, the knowledge on Wikipedia has become more globally representative of the world, as have the editors that contribute to the site. For example, the community of volunteer editors in Sub-Saharan Africa has grown by 44% percent since 2020. This is because of steady programmatic efforts led by Wikimedia volunteers, affiliates, and others—many of whom have received funding, training, and other support from the Foundation.

Why does global representation of Wikipedia volunteer editors matter? It matters because Wikipedia is a reflection of the people who contribute to it. Diverse perspectives create higher quality, more representative, and relevant knowledge for all of us.  

7. Contributions from readers keep us going.

The humans who give back to Wikipedia—whether through donations, words of support, edits, or through the many other ways people contribute—inspire us every day. All of us here at the Wikimedia Foundation want to take this opportunity to thank them. We’d like to share some of our favorite messages from donors over the years. We hope they move you as much as they have moved us:

“Wikipedia has been an endless sea of adventure for my curious soul. Where I had been admonished throughout my childhood for asking ‘stupid questions’, what you do has been a safe space for me to satisfy all curiosity and to foster a skill for learning my entire life now.

What stories will be told of you hundreds of years from now I cannot imagine. An endless Alexandria, every one of you a part of something that is sure to be treasured for as long as humanity draws breath.”

Donor from Ireland

“Thank you so much. Because what I am today in my life, it is only possible because of knowledge I have got from Wikipedia. Wikipedia is part of our life. It is emotion. Internet without Wikipedia is like a body without [a] soul. Thank you for being with us and keep enlighten[ing] our minds.”

Donor from India

We hope that we helped to deepen your understanding about how important reader donations are to Wikipedia. If you have any questions, please check out our FAQ.

If you are in a position to give, you can make a donation to Wikipedia at donate.wikimedia.org.

Lisa Seitz-Gruwell is the Chief Advancement Officer and Deputy to the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on 3 November 2022. Several data points, figures, and links were updated on 23 October 2023 and again in November 2024.

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In early November 2024, I had the privilege of attending the Mercator Language Conference on Shaping Policy for Minority Languages and Multilingualism in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. This inspiring event brought together language activists, researchers, educators, linguists, and policymakers, all dedicated to safeguarding linguistic diversity and supporting minority languages worldwide. My attendance was made possible through funding from the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub, with the support of Wikitongues.

Hosted by the Mercator European Research Centre, the conference provided a vibrant platform to exchange ideas, learn from community-driven initiatives, and explore innovative strategies for language revitalization. Here I share some of the most compelling insights from the event and reflect on how they relate to Wikimedia’s commitment to language diversity and the work of the Language Diversity Hub.

Community-Driven Language Revitalization

One key theme was the power of community-led projects in language preservation. Activists and community leaders from regions like Friesland, the Basque Country, and the Sami territories shared successful programs that engage younger generations and strengthen community ties. These projects included language immersion camps, local media production in minority languages, and storytelling sessions that connect language learners with native speakers.

A standout example came from Friesland, where education programs integrate the Frisian language at all levels, from preschool to university. This approach has shown measurable success, with a significant rise in Frisian fluency among young people and a growing acceptance of Frisian as an everyday language. Such community-rooted initiatives demonstrate how engaging local voices is crucial to sustaining a language and embedding it in daily life.

Research on Multilingualism and Cognitive Benefits

The conference also presented research highlighting the cognitive and cultural advantages of multilingualism, especially in multilingual European regions where minority and majority languages coexist. Studies from linguists in Catalonia and Wales showed that multilingual education not only strengthens minority languages but also enhances students’ proficiency in dominant languages and boosts cognitive flexibility. This reinforces the idea that language diversity should be seen as a benefit to societies, not a barrier.

This research resonates deeply with Wikimedia’s mission to support knowledge equity. By providing access to content in underrepresented languages, we encourage linguistic diversity as an educational and social asset, celebrating the cognitive benefits of learning in multiple languages.

Policy Support for Minority Languages

A dedicated session focused on policy frameworks for minority language protection. Policymakers and representatives from the Friesland government emphasized the need for legal protections and sustainable funding to support minority languages. They discussed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages as an example of international collaboration on this front. However, they also highlighted the importance of community-led efforts and monitoring to ensure that policies create real, measurable outcomes.

For Wikimedia, this underscores the importance of advocating for supportive language policies that allow digital platforms like ours to document, promote, and protect minority languages. By joining forces with policymakers and leveraging research, we can help ensure that minority languages receive the protection they need.

Digital Tools for Language Preservation

One of the most exciting aspects of the conference was the demonstration of new technologies designed to support language preservation. From AI-based translation tools to mobile apps for language learning, these innovations open new doors for reaching broader audiences and making language resources more accessible. Open-source platforms, in particular, were seen as essential to this work, aligning perfectly with Wikimedia’s values of openness and collaboration.

The Language Diversity Hub and Wikitongues have pioneered open, community-driven models for language documentation. Seeing how rapidly technology is advancing, there are now greater opportunities than ever for us to integrate digital tools that support endangered and minority languages on Wikimedia projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikisource, and Wikipedia.

Looking Forward: Wikimedia’s Role in Language Diversity

Attending the Mercator Language Conference reaffirmed the vital role that Wikimedia projects can play in supporting language diversity. As Wikimedia communities, we are in a unique position to empower speakers of minority languages, helping to document their knowledge, history, and culture on a global scale. Our mission aligns with the vision set forth at this conference: to see languages flourish not only as cultural treasures but as integral parts of our shared global knowledge.

In the coming months, I look forward to exploring how we can apply these insights to further our work at the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub. By fostering partnerships with community activists, exploring new digital tools for language documentation, and advocating for policy support, we can strengthen our role as a digital home for every language.

I’m deeply grateful to the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub and Wikitongues for supporting my participation in this conference. It was an invaluable experience, connecting with passionate individuals from around the world who share our commitment to preserving and promoting linguistic diversity. I look forward to continuing this work and bringing these lessons into our efforts to empower all language communities on Wikimedia platforms.

14/11/2024-20/11/2024

Mapping

• Detroit has become the most comprehensively mapped city on Mapillary, achieving 99.8% street coverage through a pioneering street-level imagery (SLI) programme launched in 2018 to address asset management challenges, improving city planning and even addressing census undercounts, demonstrating the transformative power of open SLI platforms in municipal operations.
• Andy Townsend highlighted the issues with using the generic highway=path tag in England and Wales, noting its lack of descriptive clarity and challenges in tagging legal access rights. He suggested using alternative tags such as highway=footway, where applicable, and adding detailed attributes to improve mapping accuracy.
• Requests for comments have been made on these proposals:
  • amenity=travellers_lounge for mapping public seating areas in transport facilities, such as airport lounges or railway station waiting areas.
  • rental:powerbank=yes, to map stations where users can rent portable power banks to charge mobile devices on the go.
  • addr:milestone=* to allow the tagging of street addresses that use the distance from a reference point as part of the address.
  • languages:official=* and languages:preferred=*, to enable the specification of languages for name rendering, for example the _targeted display of street names in different languages or scripts in map applications.
  • education=* to tag various educational facilities, programmes, or initiatives, such as schools, training centres, or extracurricular services.
  • railway:train_protection=* to tag specific train protection systems used on railway lines, such as Automatic Train Control, European Train Control System, or similar technologies.
  • shared_green=* to tag pedestrian crossings where vehicles and pedestrians share a green light, helping to identify potentially hazardous situations and improve route planning and safety information.

Mapping campaigns

• Barro examined ► the state of bike parking at daycare centres and schools in Finland’s capital region, highlighting outdated infrastructure and its mismatch with sustainable mobility goals. Using OpenStreetMap data, Barro’s mapping project reveals challenges like inadequate bike racks, underscoring the need for improved planning, and compliance with Helsinki’s 2016 bike parking guidelines.
• As part of the EU Green Diplomacy Weeks across the ASEAN countries, more than 450 Filipino youth participated in a Map for Climate mapathon, using OpenStreetMap to identify climate-vulnerable areas to promote disaster resilience and sustainable planning, showcasing ASEAN-EU cooperation on climate action.

Community

• ASRvwde shared ► their journey from frustration with proprietary mapping systems like Google Maps and TomTom, to embracing the open, editable nature of OSM and its tools, culminating in a deeper commitment to open-source solutions.
• Pieter Vander Vennet detailed the transition of MapComplete’s image hosting from Imgur to Panoramax, citing changes to Imgur’s terms of use and functionality, while encouraging the wider adoption of Panoramax for OpenStreetMap projects.
• Christopher Beddow explored the challenges of maintaining up-to-date maps in a rapidly changing world and examined how digital tools, sensors and crowdsourced data such as OpenStreetMap aim to synchronise geospatial data with reality. While OSM provides near real-time updates, the delivery of maps often lags due to the need for error correction and cost efficiency. Advanced tools such as AI, sensors, and augmented reality promise better mapping, but the Sisyphean task of creating a perfectly dynamic map highlights the limits of technology and human effort. Ultimately, mapping validates our ever-changing world, bridging subjective experience with objective geospatial records.
• The Trufi Association congratulated the Duitama Mapping Stars, a group of 12 Colombian high school students from Salesano College, who received volunteer certificates for their mapping contributions under the guidance of teacher Leonardo Gutiérrez and principal Pd. Peña.

Imports

• spalinger wrote a guide outlining a detailed process for importing Swiss GWR address data into OpenStreetMap using JOSM, emphasising preparation, merging, and validation to improve data accuracy and consistency, while identifying areas for further improvement.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OSMF Board’s 2024 report highlighted achievements including improved governance, support for global and regional State of the Map conferences, enhanced onboarding processes, and progress on relocating the organisation into the European Union. Diversity milestones were also celebrated, with the Board having its highest female representation yet.

Events

• Save the date for the first monthly online Panoramax meeting, in English, on Monday 25 November at 16:00 UTC.

Education

• Ray Berger’s guide explains how to add a brand preset to OpenStreetMap using the Name Suggestion Index, aiming to simplify a process that even experienced mappers and developers can find confusing.

OSM research

• HeiGIT has released a global dataset of road surface types (paved versus unpaved), filling the 67% gap in OpenStreetMap road surface data. Developed using geo-AI and funded by the Klaus Tschira Foundation, this dataset improves road safety, economic development, and environmental planning by optimising emergency routes and supply chains, particularly in under-mapped regions.

Maps

• ^[1] Prasanna Venkadesh has updated StreetLightsMap to use Protomaps’ PMTiles vector format as its base map, replacing the standard OpenStreetMap raster tiles and reducing the load on OSM’s tile servers thanks to Protomaps’ free non-commercial API access.
• OpenStreetMap’s new dark mode has updated the user interface to match the user’s system settings, but many users have criticised the dimming effect on map tiles for reducing contrast and usability, particularly in terms of accessibility. The developers acknowledged the concerns and mentioned future plans for improvement, including possible vector tile updates, while noting the limitations of the current infrastructure.

OSM in action

• There are two Geoguessr-like games based on Panoramax images available, PANOGUESSR and PanoramaxGuessr.

Software

• MapMatrix showcased a React-based application built by Claude AI that enables synchronised multi-view map comparisons with features such as MapLibre integration, custom layers, and configurable layouts.
• Emilio Mariscal has developed ChatMap, a simple tool for creating maps from WhatsApp chats, designed to assist emergency services and humanitarian organisations by converting shared locations into actionable maps during disasters and emergencies. Users can export chat data as a ZIP file and upload it to ChatMap to visualise locations, with potential applications beyond crisis response.
• The osmapiR v0.2.2 update improved compatibility with the httr2 library, enhanced documentation for OpenStreetMap server changes, introduced new query parameters for changesets, and resolved bugs related to time-based queries, further streamlining OpenStreetMap data management in R.
• Traili Map is a user-friendly route planner for bike touring, focused on utilising existing bike trails and infrastructure, primarily sourced from OpenStreetMap. It allows users to explore and plan routes based on official bike trails, currently covering Europe, with North America and other regions planned soon. The app employs Graphhopper for fast route calculations and uses Next.js and .NET for its web interface, with plans to transition to self-hosted map tiles for greater flexibility.

Programming

• Mark Litwintschik reviewed OpenStreetMap’s move to hosting Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT), which allow users to customise map styles and extract data more flexibly than static raster tiles. Mark provided a step-by-step guide to visualising these tiles using tools such as QGIS and Jupyter Notebook, discussed hardware and software setups, and highlighted how vector tiles can improve the clarity and usability of mapping applications.
• Overpass.jl is a Julia package that provides a lightweight wrapper for the Overpass API, allowing users to perform spatial queries, parse results flexibly, and customise API endpoints with minimal dependencies.
• Greg Smith explored the process of importing the global OpenStreetMap database into PostgreSQL in less than four hours using tweaked settings, advanced hardware, and updates in PostgreSQL and osm2pgsql. Improvements in GIST index building, osm2pgsql’s index compression techniques, and state-of-the-art SSDs significantly improved performance, demonstrating how advances in database and hardware technologies are streamlining the handling of massive geospatial data.

Releases

• OsmAnd Android 4.9 introduced new features such as route recording with speed analysis, improvements to the GPX viewer, and search capabilities, the ability to add bookmarks while navigating, better map rendering performance, and updated public transport tools, improving both the user experience and the versatility of the application.
• A new beta version of the Panoramax Android app, for taking street-level photos, has been released.
• OsmAPP v1.6.0 has introduced major updates such as driving directions, enhanced search capabilities using the Overpass API, improved public transport and feature panels, multi-language support and innovative sharing tools, as well as a beta climbing app with features tailored for climbers, emphasising usability and open source principles.

Did you know …

• … that BBBike Map Compare lets you view maps from OpenStreetMap, Google, and other sources side by side?
• … that GPSLogger is a lightweight Android app for recording GNSS data in multiple formats (such as GPX, KML, and CSV) and supports uploads to services including Google Drive and Dropbox, all while being optimised for battery efficiency?
• … that you can find local OSM communities in your area by exploring the OSM Teams web app?
• … that Scrambled Hex Maps by Tripgeo is a map-based puzzle game in which you rearrange city hexes to reveal the correct order?

Other “geo” things

• Foursquare announced the release of FSQ Open Source Places, a freely available dataset of over 100 million global points of interest updated monthly under the Apache 2.0 licence. This release is aimed at generating geospatial data by combining AI and human contributions for comprehensive and accurate mapping, and inviting community collaboration to build this foundational layer.
• Simon Poole has expressed mixed reactions to Foursquare’s announcement. While acknowledging the value of releasing the data, he questioned the use of the Apache 2.0 licence, pointing out that it is not a standard licence for data and raises uncertainties about its application and compatibility with other data licences.
• The F24 ferry in Berlin shows that informal, community-driven transport deserves recognition, whether it’s a small ferry in Europe or a minibus in Lagos.
• Google has used ► anonymised GNSS data from millions of Android smartphones to accurately map the ionosphere and thus minimise interference from this layer of the atmosphere, which is particularly beneficial to regions with few monitoring stations. In some cases, the method surpassed existing models in terms of accuracy and provided scientific insights, for example the detection of plasma bubbles and equatorial anomalies.
• Niantic has announced the creation of a Large Geospatial Model (LGM), developed using visual scans collected by Pokémon Go players and users of the Scaniverse app, to build an AI navigation system for physical spaces. This model draws from over 10 million scanned locations globally, capturing unique pedestrian perspectives, and processes geolocated images to create neural networks representing specific locations. With over 150 trillion parameters, the LGM aims to enable precise spatial understanding and has applications in AR, robotics, and logistics. While the scans were gathered under the relevant terms of service, some players have expressed concerns about their use in AI development.
• The Berlin City Traffic Information Centre has published ► a parking space dataset that covers all public street parking within the Berlin S-Bahn ring and selected adjacent areas. They have also launched an interactive ► map providing detailed information for each parking space, including its exact location (street and house number), orientation, parking times, and associated fees with corresponding time slots.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Strasbourg	Strasbourg 3ème Atelier de cartographie sur OpenStreetMap		2024-11-25
Saint-Étienne	Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire		2024-11-25
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-11-27
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #64	✓	2024-11-26
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)		2024-11-27
Lübeck	148. OSM-Stammtisch Lübeck und Umgebung		2024-11-28
Olomouc	SotM CZ+SK 2024		2024-11-29
Sint-Michiels	LiLi-app mapathon		2024-11-29
ঢাকা	State of the Map Asia		2024-11-29 – 2024-11-30
Salzburg	OSM Treffen Salzburg		2024-12-03
	Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng]		2024-12-03
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2024-12-04
	OSM Indoor Meetup		2024-12-04
	LCCWG Monthly Meeting		2024-12-05
Montrouge	Réunion des contributeurs de Montrouge et du Sud de Paris		2024-12-05
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2024-12-06
København	OSMmapperCPH		2024-12-08
中正區	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #71		2024-12-09

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Mannivu, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, derFred, mcliquid.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Over the past week I have spent some time writing some code to start running a little bot on the wikibase.world project, aimed at expanding the number of Wikibases that are collected there, and automating collection of some of the data that can easily be automated.

Over the past week, the bot has imported 650 Wikibase installs that increases the total to 784, and active to 755.

I mainly wanted to do this to try and visualize “federation” or rather, links between Wikibases that are currently occurring, hence creating P55 (links to Wikibase) and P56 (linked from Wikibase).

251 Wikibases seem to link to each other, and Wikidata is very clearly at the centre of that web.

Many Wikibases only link to Wikidata, but there are a few other notable clusters, including Wikimedia Commons (but see the improvements section below, as some of these may be false positives).

I’m not sure why Q2 didn’t render the label, but Q2 is Commons in the below image.

Others such as LexBib, MaRDi portal, PersonalData.io, Librarybase, R74n and more also seem to have multiple connections (more than one)

Here is a fairly nice SPARQL query that can get you these links in their current state, in a table…

PREFIX wwdt: <https://wikibase.world/prop/direct/>
PREFIX wwd: <https://wikibase.world/entity/>

SELECT ?wikibase ?wikibaseLabel ?linksTo ?linksToLabel
WHERE {
    ?wikibase wwdt:P3 wwd:Q10.
    ?wikibase wwdt:P13 wwd:Q54.
    ?wikibase wwdt:P55 ?linksTo
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}   

Runnable here: https://tinyurl.com/28dor4qe

The scripts

Very briefly, there are a collection of scripts that import Wikibases found via a variety of methods (I’m open to new ideas if you have them).

• wikibase.cloud: which exposes an API of all currently active installations
• wikibase-metadata.toolforge.org: which as some data collected about usage of “Wikibase Suite” installed elsewhere
• google: with some painfully long, crafted search terms that match the few things identifying a Wikibase that might get indexed.

These scripts import a very bare-bones version of an Item, such as [1], [2], [3]…

Once the data is in wikibase.world, a separate process loads all currently active Wikibases, and tries to add and refine information.

• Load the site and see if it is a 200
• Try to normalize the URLs a bit if possible
• Try to detect and record the host
• Add an inception date, based on the first logged action by MediaWiki
• Add entity types and tools used (sometimes)… (extensions to come soon?)
• Add links to and from other Wikibases based on some External Identifiers, and all URL properties.

The code makes use of wikibase-edit and wikibase-sdk written by maxlath. They were a pleasure to use, really simplify Wikibase APIs down to basics, which is all I needed here.

Improvements

There are many other elements of data that could be added, and that also would be nice to be able to filter by across all Wikibases, such as number of entities, number of users, date of first Wikibase edit etc. I plan on slowly trying to tackle these parts moving forward.

There are also possibly a few issues with the current process

• Not all External Identifier properties are currently inspected. Only those that have a formatter URL property defined, and also that have that formatter URL property exposed via WikibaseManifest (so the WikibaseManifest extension is also a requirement)
• All URLs are inspected for known domains, and these may link to NON Wikibase and NON entity pages. Such as a URL that just links to https://commons.wikimedia.org would currently appear as a link…

Currently, I have just been running the scripts locally, but I’ll aim to set them up on GitHub Actions so they run weekly perhaps?

And let’s pretend that I wrote the code in a nice tidy way, haha, naaah

That will come (if this all still seems like a good idea)

🕑 1 hour

Stephen Harrison is a tech lawyer and journalist who has been writing about Wikipedia since 2018, including dozens of articles for the online magazine Slate as part of his Source Notes column. He is the author of the 2024 novel The Editors, which is about a group of editors of the fictional user-editable online encyclopedia "Infopendium" who are drawn together by dramatic events.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Stephen Harrison website
• Source Notes blog/newsletter
• Stephen Harrison's list of Wikipedia-related articles
  • More comprehensive list
• Reddit /r/pics subreddit (my apologies for casting aspersions - it's not that political any more! It was more political during the recent U.S. presidential election.)
• "Times of London: Wikipedia, AI, & THE EDITORS | An Audiobook Update" (October 2024 blog post)

The report “Open Movement’s Common(s) Causes” maps the current threats and opportunities facing the open movement, based on the ongoing work of the organisations behind the Common(s) Cause event, which took place in Katowice, Poland; as a pre-conference event for Wikimania 2024 on 6 August, 2024.

The meeting was organised by Creative Commons, Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Future, and Wikimedia Europe in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation. The goal of the meeting was to create links between different advocacy efforts so that a shared advocacy strategy for the Knowledge Commons can be created.

One of the calls that jumped out for us was a call for defining new open principles – principles that could clarify what openness means in the context of today’s digital space and ensure its pro-public, democratic potential. Formulating such principles could help against several challenges, e.g. open washing.

Another clear call is the one confirming the assumptions behind the Common(s) Cause project: it is the call for a shared advocacy agenda, which could help ensure that Knowledge Commons are treated and sustained as critical digital infrastructures.

The event gathered over 55 participants from 20 countries, most of whom travelled to Katowice to attend the Wikimania conference. The majority of attendees were from open advocacy communities. The event not only enabled the organizers to build stronger working ties with one another, but with the many other organisations who were represented at the event. 

Participants acknowledged that the power of the open movement is only as strong as the bonds of the people working to advance an open, equitable agenda, and collective impact can only be achieved through individuals from different organisations working closely together.

The report identifies a few common causes that can be found at the intersection of open movement organisations’ strategies, the socio-technological zeitgeist, and current policy opportunities, such as: 

1. (Re)defining openness in a new technological era.
2. Creation of a shared advocacy strategy and enhanced regional and thematic cooperation across the organisations.
3. Developing and testing governance approaches for our digital commons.
4. Advancing openness and sustainability for the technology, data, content, and governance of Digital Public Infrastructure.

This report is a starting point and serves as an invitation to the wider open community to join these causes as well as to formulate their own, which could then be backed by other organisations. The next step in this process will be disseminating its findings, hopefully resulting in further backing and refinement of the causes and additional feedback from the wider community, which this small convening could not fully represent.

Read the full report

Pode parecer uma pergunta filosófica, mas atualmente essa é uma pergunta bastante prática, considerando os recentes avanços na inteligência artificial generativa e nos modelos de linguagem de grande escala (do inglês large language models, ou LLMs). Devido ao uso generalizado da tecnologia de IA generativa, projetada para prever e imitar respostas humanas, agora é possível criar, quase sem esforço, textos que parecem ter saído da Wikipédia.

Minha resposta a essa pergunta é simples: não, não seria a mesma coisa.

O processo de criar conhecimento de forma livre, compartilhá-lo e aperfeiçoá-lo ao longo do tempo, publicamente e com a ajuda de centenas de milhares de pessoas voluntárias, é o que, há 20 anos, tem definido a Wikipédia e os diversos outros projetos da Wikimedia. A Wikipédia contém conhecimento confiável e de fontes seguras justamente porque esses conteúdos são criados, debatidos e selecionados por pessoas. Ela também se baseia em um modelo aberto e não comercial, o que significa que a Wikipédia é livre para acessar e compartilhar, e sempre será. E em uma internet inundada de conteúdos gerados por máquinas, isso significa que a Wikipédia tem ainda mais valor.

Nos últimos seis meses, dezenas de LLMs foram lançados ao público, treinados com base em amplos conjuntos de dados capazes de ler, resumir e gerar textos. A Wikipédia é uma das maiores bases abertas de informação da internet, com versões em mais de 300 idiomas. Até o momento, todos os LLMs são treinados com base nos conteúdos da Wikipédia, e ela é quase sempre a maior fonte de dados de treinamento nos conjuntos de dados desses LLMs.

Uma coisa óbvia a se fazer com alguma  desses novos sistemas é tentar gerar artigos da Wikipédia. É claro que as pessoas já tentaram. E, tenho certeza de que muitos leitores já perceberam isso em primeira mão, essas tentativas mostram muitos desafios no uso de LLMs para produzir o que wikipedistas chamam de conhecimento, ou seja, textos e imagens confiáveis, em formato enciclopédico, com fontes seguras. Algumas dessas limitações incluem as seguintes:

• Atualmente, os resultados dos LLMs não passam por uma checagem de fatos, e já há muitos casos conhecidos de pessoas que usam a IA generativa para tentar realizar seus trabalhos. Há inúmeras situações de baixo risco em que os resultados podem ser úteis sem causar nenhum risco, como prompts para criar textos de agradecimento, planos para férias divertidas ou um roteiro para dar início a uma redação. No entanto, em outras situações, os resultados não são tão bons, como no caso em que um LLM fabricou processos judiciais, e o advogado que usou esses resultados em um tribunal acabou sendo multado. Em outra situação, um médico demonstrou que um sistema de IA generativa apresentava diagnósticos inadequados ao analisar sintomas de pacientes atendidos no pronto-socorro. Com o tempo, acredito que esses sistemas ficarão muito melhores e se tornarão mais confiáveis em uma variedade de contextos. Uma possibilidade interessante é que a demanda por melhores fontes melhorará o acesso a pesquisas e livros on-line. Mas será preciso tempo para chegar lá e, provavelmente, uma pressão significativa por parte dos órgãos reguladores e do público para que haja melhorias que beneficiem todas as pessoas.
• Os LLMs não podem contar com informações que não foram usadas em seu treinamento para responder aos prompts. Isso significa que todos os livros do mundo que não estão disponíveis na íntegra on-line, conteúdos de pesquisas anteriores ao advento da internet e informações em outros idiomas que não o inglês não fazem parte daquilo que um LLM típico “sabe”. Consequentemente, os conjuntos de dados usados para treinar LLMs atualmente podem ampliar as desigualdades e os vieses existentes em muitas áreas – como nas contratações, na medicina e em sentenças criminais. Talvez um dia isso mude, mas estamos muito longe de poder acessar livremente e treinar LLMs em todos os diferentes tipos de informações que as pessoas em todos os idiomas usam atualmente para criar conteúdo para a Wikipédia. E, mesmo então, será necessário mais trabalho para mitigar os vieses.
• Por fim, já foi demonstrado que LLMs treinados a partir dos resultados de LLMs têm um desempenho comprovadamente pior, e chegam até mesmo a esquecer de coisas que eles já “sabiam”, uma condição chamada de “colapso do modelo”. Isso significa que, para que os LLMs tenham bons resultados e continuem melhorando, eles precisarão de um abastecimento constante de conteúdos originais, escritos por humanos, o que torna a Wikipédia e outras fontes de conteúdos gerados por humanos ainda mais valiosas. Também significa que as empresas de IA generativa de todo o mundo precisam descobrir como manter as fontes de conteúdos humanos originais, o elemento mais importante do nosso ecossistema de informações, sustentável e crescendo com o tempo.

Esses são apenas alguns dos problemas que precisam ser resolvidos enquanto internautas exploram como os LLMs podem ser usados. Acreditamos que internautas darão cada vez mais valor a fontes confiáveis de informações que tenham sido validadas por pessoas. As políticas da Wikipédia e nossa experiência de mais de uma década no uso do aprendizado de máquina para apoiar voluntários humanos oferecem lições valiosas sobre esse futuro.

Princípios para uso da IA generativa

O conteúdo gerado por máquina e as ferramentas de aprendizado de máquina não são novidade na Wikipédia e nos demais projetos da Wikimedia. Na Wikimedia Foundation, desenvolvemos ferramentas de aprendizado de máquina e IA com base nos mesmos princípios que tornaram a Wikipédia um recurso tão útil para tantas pessoas: dando centralidade à moderação de conteúdo e à governança humana. Continuamos a experimentar novas maneiras de atender às necessidades das pessoas por conhecimento de forma responsável, inclusive com plataformas de IA generativa, com o objetivo de colocar a contribuição humana e a reciprocidade em primeiro plano. As pessoas editoras da Wikipédia têm controle sobre todo o conteúdo gerado por máquina – elas editam, aprimoram e auditam qualquer trabalho feito por IA – e criam políticas e estruturas para controlar as ferramentas de aprendizado de máquina usadas para gerar conteúdo para a Wikipédia.

Esses princípios podem ser um bom ponto de partida para o uso dos LLMs atuais e em desenvolvimento. Para começar, os LLMs devem considerar como seus modelos auxiliam as pessoas de três maneiras principais:

1. Sustentabilidade. A tecnologia de IA generativa tem o potencial de afetar negativamente a motivação humana para criar conteúdo. Para preservar e incentivar mais pessoas a contribuir com seu conhecimento para o bem comum, os LLMs devem procurar aumentar e apoiar a participação humana no cultivo e na criação de conhecimento. Eles não devem jamais impedir ou substituir a criação humana de conhecimento. Isso pode ser alcançado mantendo sempre os humanos no processo e dando o devido crédito às suas contribuições. Continuar a apoiar os seres humanos no compartilhamento de seus conhecimentos não só é algo que está alinhado à missão estratégica do movimento Wikimedia, como também será necessário para continuar a expandir nosso ecossistema geral de informações, que é o que cria os dados de treinamento atualizados dos quais os LLMs dependem.
2. Equidade. Na melhor das hipóteses, os LLMs podem ampliar o acesso às informações e oferecer formas inovadoras de fornecer informações a quem busca conhecimento. Para isso, essas plataformas precisam incorporar verificações e contrapesos que não reproduzam os vieses de informação, não ampliem as lacunas de conhecimento, não perpetuem o apagamento de histórias e perspectivas tradicionalmente excluídas nem contribuam com danos aos direitos humanos. Os LLMs também devem considerar como identificar, tratar e corrigir vieses nos dados de treinamento que podem produzir resultados imprecisos e extremamente injustos.
3. Transparência. Os LLMs e suas interfaces devem permitir que os humanos entendam a origem dos resultados do modelo, verifiquem e corrijam esses resultados. Uma maior transparência na forma como os resultados são gerados pode nos ajudar a entender e, então, mitigar vieses sistêmicos nocivos. Ao permitir que os usuários desses sistemas avaliem as causas e as consequências dos vieses que podem estar presentes nos dados de treinamento ou nos resultados, pessoas criadoras e usuárias poderão contribuir para uma maior compreensão e a aplicação criteriosa dessas ferramentas.

Visão para um futuro confiável

A contribuição humana é parte essencial da internet. As pessoas são o motor que impulsionou o crescimento e a expansão da web, criando um espaço incrível para o aprendizado, os negócios e a conexão com outras pessoas.

A IA generativa pode substituir a Wikipédia? Ela pode tentar, mas essa é uma substituição que ninguém realmente deseja. Não há nada de inevitável nas novas tecnologias. Em vez disso, cabe a todos nós escolher o que é mais importante. Podemos priorizar a compreensão humana e sua contribuição com o conhecimento no mundo – de forma sustentável, equitativa e transparente – como um dos principais objetivos dos sistemas de IA generativa, e não como algo secundário. Isso ajudaria a mitigar o aumento da desinformação e das alucinações dos LLMs; garantiria que a criatividade humana fosse reconhecida pelo conhecimento criado; e, o mais importante, assegurará que os LLMs e as pessoas possam continuar a contar com um ecossistema de informações atualizado, em evolução e confiável a longo prazo.

Selena Deckelmann é Diretora de Produtos e Tecnologia na Wikimedia Foundation.

The post O valor da Wikipédia na era da IA generativa appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.

David-James Gonzales is an Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University and the host of New Books in Latino Studies. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. 

I began teaching with the Wikipedia assignment in the spring of 2018. At the time, I sought an alternative to the standard term paper that had been, and likely remains, the staple of most college history courses. My motivation was to find an assignment that students would enjoy completing and that I would enjoy grading. Over my previous six years of university teaching, I developed a dread for grading term papers as it became apparent that most students either did not have the time or did not see the point in writing a well-researched argumentative paper. Moreover, I noticed that many of my students were developing bad habits in their rush to complete term papers, including committing to an argument before establishing a research question, cherry-picking sources that confirmed unfounded assumptions, and ignoring counterevidence. I desired an assignment that would reinforce the teaching of historical methodology and leverage the accessibility of the internet, allowing students to reach a broader audience, which I hoped would motivate them to take greater pride in their work.

After speaking with colleagues and searching the internet for ideas, I stumbled upon the Wiki Education website and found the Wikipedia assignment. Despite my lack of experience editing or authoring Wikipedia pages, I was drawn to the assignment because it facilitates experiential learning by requiring students to apply the knowledge acquired through course readings, lectures, and research to a public-facing project. In my US history survey course, for example, I use the Wikipedia assignment instead of a final paper to evaluate students’ ability to do the work of a historian by choosing a topic, developing a research question, selecting and evaluating sources, and writing a historical narrative. 

I also use the assignment to help students build social and professional skills applicable beyond the classroom. To promote peer collaboration in larger classes, I have students work in pairs. Admittedly, most groan when they hear this is a group project; however, by the end of the semester, they overwhelmingly express appreciation for their partner and the flexibility the assignment provides to capitalize on each person’s strengths. For example, those interested in computer programming and coding tend to enjoy learning about wikitext and the formatting aspects of the assignment. For others, conducting research, locating images, videos, and sound clips, or writing the text of the article is preferred. While I require them to work in pairs, students decide how to manage their workload by deciding who does what and evaluating each other’s performance at the end of the term.   

To facilitate student-teacher mentoring, I require students to meet with me throughout the semester to approve their topics and receive feedback on sources and drafts. These interactions help break down the reluctance and intimidation students feel towards interacting with authority figures and often lead to future opportunities to advise them about their degree progress, university resources, and career opportunities. To teach information and media literacy, I have students turn in an annotated bibliography halfway through the term. Although not a required part of the Wikipedia assignment, I find that it reinforces the dashboard’s trainings on evaluating sources according to the credibility of the author and publication. It also teaches students to pay as much, if not more, attention to the sources used in a publication than the text itself. 

I have used the Wikipedia assignment in thirteen courses over the past six years and have been thrilled by the results. Overall, my students have published 180 new articles, edited an additional 492 articles, and added 8,500 references to Wikipedia! Incredibly, their work has received over 13 million views as of spring 2024. But the best part is that my students admit they enjoy the assignment. 

Here are a few examples of what students appreciate about the Wikipedia assignment: 

“The Wikipedia project we had over the course of the semester was very effective in getting us all to participate in the learning process. It helped us to be more involved in research and in learning how to be historians.”

“I loved the Wikipedia project we worked on throughout the semester. We got to pick our own topic and I appreciated what it taught me about doing accurate historical research.”

“I loved the Wikipedia Assignment in this class and using our research skills to be able to put something useful out onto the internet.”

“The incorporation of making a Wikipedia article was the best way to actually be part of making and recording history.”

As reflected in the comments above, students relish the “hands-on” opportunity provided by the Wikipedia assignment to apply what they learn through a medium that allows them to create something that makes a public contribution beyond the classroom. And this is the primary reason why I continue to teach with Wikipedia; it encourages students to become more informed knowledge producers rather than passive consumers of information.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your courses? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.